concurrent.futures.wait() waits forever if given a cancelled future
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Description
Bug report
concurrent.futures.wait() hangs if given a future that is already cancelled.
Steps to reproduce:
- Get a future that is cancellable (create lots of jobs such that the later ones cannot start yet and are therefore cancellable):
>>> import concurrent.futures
>>> pool = concurrent.futures.ThreadPoolExecutor(max_workers=1)
>>> import time
>>> for _ in range(1000): future = pool.submit(time.sleep, 1000)
- Cancel this future and note that it returns
Truemeaning it has been cancelled.
>>> future.cancel()
True
- Now waiting on this future hangs:
>>> concurrent.futures.wait([future])
The expected behaviour, regardless of the value of return_when is that wait() treats cancelled futures as already completed. This is essentially how return_when=FIRST_COMPLETED and return_when=ALL_COMPLETED are documented to behave:
The function will return when any future finishes or is cancelled.
and
The function will return when all futures finish or are cancelled.
Treating a future that is cancelled prior to wait() as different to one that changes state to cancelled once waiting risks a race condition: it could change state after any possible check but before blocking. i.e. it needs to be level-triggered not edge-triggered. And indeed, it works this way for futures that are done, just not ones that are cancelled.
Your environment
- CPython versions tested on: 3.9.7, 3.10.2
- Operating system and architecture: Linux
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start by reproducing the provided example with concurrent.futures.wait() and an already-cancelled future. Inspect the wait() entry point and its handling of cancelled futures, then add coverage for the reported behavior; done means wait() returns instead of hanging for the documented return_when values.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- python
- Domain
- backend
- Issue type
- Bug
- Difficulty
- 3/5
- Estimated time
- 1-2 days
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Clearly specified
- Newbie friendliness
- 52/100